Over the last century air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment
involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficient--and often
irritating--means for distributing masses of people to the far reaches
of the globe. During the hundred-year history of human air travel, it
has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and
utterly dire. This anthology traces this trajectory from the early
letters and memoirs of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Charles and Anne
Morrow Lindbergh, to the diaries of Amelia Earhart. Antoine de
Saint-Exupery's heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of
Roald Dahl, and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter.
More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Mike
Albo, Maxine Swann, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary
subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex, to etiquette for
cramped seating and accounts of racial profiling post-9/11. Flight
Patterns promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers, and a
gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writings exude the primal
fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the world--and
one's own life--from a great distance. Flight Patterns renders
airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.
